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Struggling Scrolls may go free-to-play

Mojang co-founder Markus Persson intensely dislikes free-to-play games, but collectible digital card game Scrolls may have to do so thanks to flagging sales.

Persson wrote on free-to-play almost two years ago to the day, "The reason anyone switches to 'free to play' is to make more money. You get your players hooked on your game, and then you try to monetize them. The idea is to find a model where there basically is no cap on how much the player can spend, then try to encourage players to spend more and more money. Various psyhological traps like abusing the sense of sunk costs get exploited, and eventually you end up with a game that's designed more like a slot machine than half-life 2."

According to co-founder Jakob Porser, however, Scrolls may have to do just that. "We never want to make a game that sells lot of expensive things just because there are people who are willing to buy them," Porser stated in an interview, "However, we do not close (the door) for making Scrolls a free game in the future if needed to attract more players."

Scrolls sold 110K units in its first month of release, but almost no new sales since.